A topical cream for erectile dysfunction shows promise in animal testing and could become an alternative for men who can’t tolerate the pill form of the drugs, U.S. researchers report.

Typical animals you’ll test on in a trial are rats, dogs, and sometimes simians. I’m pretty sure that’s going to be a job they give to the intern. I wouldn’t imagine that kind of job is what you thought you were signing up for when you got your degree in biology or animal sciences. But what about when it goes to human trials?

Clinical trials on humans typically recruit healthy young people, using double blind studies with some study groups getting the drug, and others getting placebo. In this case, you won’t be able to use healthy young males, because your placebo is liable to be 100% effective. So trials will definitely have to seek out people who have erectile difficulties, which is typically not your healthy young males.

But it’s a good development if it works. Viagra was actually meant to treat high blood pressure and angina, but it wasn’t terribly good at that. Rumor has it that people in the trials asked if they could keep getting more of the drug, and when researched discovered why, they realized that its side effect was worth more than it was for the initial disease. But Viagra still has effects on the cardiovascular system, so it’s not well tolerated by everyone.

My wife is an MD and told me an interesting thing. Viagra is actually used quite a bit on children for its original purpose of controlling blood pressure. For some reason it works better for that on them than old people and is better tolerated than other blood pressure controllers.